Read Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 for Free Online

indicated an input language pattern. How fortuitous! Perhaps something of his warning system's message had been comprehended after all.
    "Put down the boy or we will open fire."
    The words hung there in memory, awaiting decipherment by the language synthesis system. Still the burning clown held the little boy, gripped tightly in his bare skeletal hands. Just as the translated data was mapped by the central module to inference blocks and response scripts, the Heuristic Engine finally returned with the scan of the central module's activity.
    Severe error occurred in central module at approximately 5381725587843 (16 Jul 2140 16:46:27). Advise immediate halt to current operations!
    He poured over the details of the report for several milliseconds. It seemed that a critical fault had occurred in two major regions of the clown's central module: the tactile sensor drivers, and the empathic inference submodule. Neither event had been captured by the error handling routines. Both submodules had been rendered completely non-functional for the last two hours. And two hours without a functioning central module would be enough to violate all the Directives, several times over. The clown shuddered. He immediately halted all systems and restarted the malfunctioning components.
    As the tactile sensor drivers began to function again, he became acutely aware for the first time since leaping through the flaming hoop that the membrane covering his metal skeleton had been mostly melted away by the fire–that it was still on fire, fed by the leaking fuel and pneumatic fluids, burning brightly in the dim light of the circus tent.
    "I said put down the boy or we will open–"
    Words from the security guards. More words to interpret. They would have to be held in memory for a few hundred milliseconds until the language synthesis system had rebooted.
    Then the empathic inference submodule restarted, and the clown immediately dropped the child.
    He focused his primary ocular sensor on the boy at his feet. The child was shrieking in bewildered terror. His small body was scarred from the fire and from the heat of the clown's metallic hands.
    You have absolutely violated the Directives. You did this , said the Heuristic Engine, piping the chastising comments directly into the central module's memory. You could have prevented this if only you'd responded to the failures sooner .
    He wailed with anguish for what had happened to the boy while the Heuristic Engine piped likely outcomes to the central module. Most involved the clown being deactivated and stripped down to components. You'll be torn apart and made into toasters and microwave ovens, clown. You really blew it this time.
    Even if he was made into toasters, at least he would no longer have to endure the Heuristic Engine's goading. That was one thing he wouldn't miss. He didn't know what would happen to him after his central module was deactivated, but it would certainly be a more peaceful existence than this. He just wished he could have a chance to explain himself before it happened.
    As the security guards descended upon his burning skeleton, the clown fumbled with the language synthesizer, grasping for the words to express his regret at having so completely failed to meet the demands of the Directives. But it was no use. He knew the operation wouldn't complete before their bullets tore apart his central module and memory stores, so he made the only sound he knew how to make, adding to it a sad inflection, hoping that the message would somehow be heard–that, in the end, he would be understood, maybe even pitied. But perhaps that was asking too much.
    G-GAHK-GAHK-GAHK-G-GAHK-GAHK-GAHK…
     
     
    ###
     
     
    Robert Quinlivan lives in Chicago where he works in software engineering.
     

The Properties of Water
    Alex Hernandez
     
    Ignacio and Ojore sat in an ordinary clinic on the outskirts of their artificial island adrift on a pistachio-colored sea. They were engrossed in the image of a